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Keywords: tRNS, right parietal, air-pistol shooting, aiming, performance improvement.
The aim of the study was to investigate the possible effects on the performance of a skilled shooter of the delivery of transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) to the right parietal and left frontal areas of the brain. An athlete (35-year-old male) with 16 years of shooting experience was involved in the study. The participant performed 40 shots in two different sessions (sham and tRNS) during which his performance was assessed using the SCATT shooter training system, while physiological and postural data were collected. Findings showed that tRNS stimulation can improve shooting performance. Considering heart rate as an index of arousal, it is evident that its increase during the tRNS is consistent with the hypothesis that arousal plays an important role in modulating selective attention. Probably this is caused by the increase of cognitive resources devoted to help, maintain, and sustain attention for the time necessary to perform the visual-spatial-motor task.
Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) is a noninvasive set of techniques (Nitsche et al., 2008) that consists in applying a low-level electric stimulation (1-2 mA) on the scalp through two electrodes. The changes induced by a single session of tES are reversible, lasting from a few minutes to over an hour. These behavioral changes depend on cognitive changes, which, in turn, are caused by the modulation of the excitability of the network involved in the execution of a task. In particular, transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) provides random noise frequency comprised between 1 and 640 Hz (low frequency: 1-101 Hz [Lf-tRNS]; high frequency: 101-640 Hz [Hf-tRNS]).
Recent studies showed that Hf-tRNS causes a positive modulation of cortical excitability of motor areas (Terney, Chaieb, Moliadze, Antal, & Paulus, 2008). Indeed, only 10 min of Hf-tRNS produces an increase of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) amplitude, which persists after the end of the stimulation. Although some authors found that tRNS induces cortical excitability similar to that induced by anodic transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS; Terney et al., 2008), other studies demonstrated that HftRNS produces a performance improvement in perceptual learning tasks that seems to be higher than Lf-tRNS and tDCS applications (Fertonani, Pirulli, & Miniussi, 2011). The authors suggested that Hf-tRNS can prevent the homeostasis of the system...